Race Date: Sunday 24th September 2023

Race Report by Colleen Moore

While my husband and I were visiting a friend near Stafford we thought we would tick off the letter I for the parkrun alphabet challenge at Isabel Trail. Sadly, this was the week before the organised Striders visit but two other Striders were in attendance (Mark and Angela Jackson). By chance we discovered that the Stafford 10k was also on the following day so a last-minute sign up was a no brainer.

We had also been trying and failing all summer to arrange an approximate halfway race meet up with another friend who used to live in Sheffield but has now moved to Hereford. This last-minute arranging was the push needed to actually get the race meet up to take place, so early on Sunday morning the three of us met up at the Doxey Road car park, where parking was a bargain at £1 for the day.

After obtaining our numbers we nipped across the road into the train station to use the toilets to avoid the portable toilets, this was a rare occasion for myself where the female toilet queue was shorter than the men’s!

Back to the start line which was sectioned into predicted finish times, the pacers then arrived with far smaller gaps between the pacers than the usual 5-minute intervals. I positioned myself between the 55 and 57-minute flag carriers. Pleasingly the race got underway on time at 10:30am, it was a mostly closed road loop including the return half of the Isabel trail. The route was mostly very flat, despite the claims of some of the local people that there were some tough hills on the route. There was good support around the course particularly on the first and last couple of kilometres around Victoria park. The weather on the day was quite pleasant, the initial forecast suggested it could be wet and windy but the wind failed to materialise and we only got about 15 seconds of drizzle.

As we reached roughly nine kilometres in, we returned to Victoria park running under the finish line before being whipped away to the far side of the park, around a few corners before doing a little out and back to cruelly prolong the agony a bit further. I crossed the finish line in a time of 57:13 pretty spent, never has a banana tasted so good. All participations got a colourful medal and you could add a colourful t-shirt for a small additional cost. There were a variety of food and drink vendors at the finish, all three of us decide to plump for the extravagant donut option, got to get the burnt calories back somehow.

The first male was Daniel Haymes of Derby AC, who finished in a time of 32:01, The first female was the unaffiliated Maisie Trueman in a time of 39:13. There were 1394 finishers with 569 woman and 825 men taking part. As the race takes place on the same day as the Sheffield 10K I would recommend it to anyone who wants to do a 10K starting with a “S” in September but wants to avoid the climbs of our local 10K.

Colleen was the lone Strider on the day.

Strider Results